Bad sex award cancelled ‘because 2020 has been bad enough’

The Literary Review’s ‘bad sex’ award has been cancelled because, its organisers say, the public has already been exposed to “too many bad things in 2020”. The prize for “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in sound literary novels” will resume next year. In the meantime, the judges warned authors not to take the cancellation as a “licence to write bad sex”.

Whale frolics near Statue of Liberty

A humpback whale has been spotted in waters around the Statue of Liberty, One World Trade Center and other iconic landmarks off New York harboir. “It’s a bit of a silver lining with COVID that there’s not much boat traffic out here, and the whale has a very good chance of getting out into the ocean,” said an expert. More than a dozen humpback whales have been detected in New York waters in recent years.

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Michael Jackson’s monkey destroyed vocal booth

Bubbles, Michael Jackson’s famous monkey, disrupted the recording of Beat It with a dirty protest, reports the Daily Express. A guitarist present at the recording said Jackson “stopped bringing [Bubbles] to the studio because he tore apart the vocal booth and threw s**t against the wall at Westlake Audio”. He added: “Man, that monkey just ripped that f**king vocal booth to shreds.”